A few Clarifications...
1. You do not have to have a Freesat HD box to receive BBC HD Channels. Other HD receivers and PC cards work for the unencrypted service and the BBC have accepted this. It is, AFAIK, only Freesat HD systems that need to have DVB-S2 - not Freesat or Sky+ non-HD systems.
2. BBC One HD and BBC HD together with unencrypted ITV HD and NHK World HD transmitted until last weekend using DVB-S. Unencrypted CH4 HD was the only one using DVB-S2. I believe all encrypted HD did use DVB-S2.
3. The BBC did have a Statement of Direction about migrating to DVB-S2 but no date was given. The BBC announced the switch on Thursday evening to be taking place early Monday morning - leaving 1 working day to make any changes required.
4. Although the BBC allegedly worked with Freesat and BskyB prior to the switch there was, apparently, no formal testing and some manufacturers were unaware of the change was taking place.
5. As well as us poor sods who had DVB-S PC Cards and were planning to upgrade when needed; it was a some, not all, of Freesat kit that did not work with the "novel" parameters that the BBC had chosen.
6. Whilst the DVB-S to DVB-S2 switch was made to increase capacity, the reason for the sudden implementation has not been announced yet. It was allegedly done to free up capacity for an experimental Wimbledon 3D service - later (I guess) to be used for 3D with the 2012 Olympics.
The BBC needs to have much better notification of and testing of changes - perhaps providing overnight testing for vendors. If they are making changes that makes kit obsolete then they should give sufficient notice (perhaps 6 months) to allow people to make necessary changes. An undated Statement of Direction is not acceptable.
For all of you in IT, the concepts of change management (user notification and signoff); user acceptance testing; system testing; alpha and beta test seem to have been totally ignored.
This is the third such badly implemented change by the BBC affecting HD service. We had the halving of the BBC HD bit rate and new encoders in 2009. Last month they introduced dynamic 1080i<>1080p switching on Freeview which caused audio dropout on some TVs.
I won't go into all the details of why I had to use DVB-S (rather than DVB-S2) when I built my Media Center PC in 2008, or what my plans had been for migration to DVB-S2 and how they have been scuppered by this change, but if you are interested head over to the Digital Spy Forums.
I'm very pleased for all those who did not have problems with the change and kindly told us all about it!